Back to Yusuf and Hana, and the argument about her mother.

Round nine hundred. It starts the usual way. Four minutes in, Yusuf is about to say the sentence he always says, which is that this house has never been his house.

He does not say it. He says: I am doing the thing again, aren't I.

Hana laughs, badly, because she is still angry. But she says: a bit, yes. And then she says the thing she was going to say anyway, about her mother being seventy, and Yusuf listens to about eighty percent of it, which is more than usual.

Nothing is solved. The door problem is still the door problem, and it will be there at Eid. What did not happen is the hour in the car.

That is what success looks like here. It is unglamorous and it is repeatable, and repeated across nine more years it is a different marriage.